You can't expect players to care about strategy when win/lose are determined by micro-transactions and the latest power creep. What use is "long term planning" when devs can make your account obsolete with a single patch?
A large portion business has shifted towards emphasizing gambling and long term monetization schemes like battle passes and in game purchases instead of making quality games unfortunately. Could be one reason for the mental decline
It's all because most games aren't games anymore, they are just slot machines, and stimulation devices, They took all the parts of games out that don't contribute to corporate profits. (more true for mobile games than desktop)
I think big sweeping claims about human behavior are always a little dangerous. We can make a suprising amount of true claims which are backed up by things proving causal links - humans generally take the path of least resistance, for example. But theres' nuance in that. Maybe it's most accurate to say "Humans generally take the path of least resistance, at least when without strong reasons to do otherwise". Something else to mention here - this article doesn't explain methodology. Maybe the study did, but there are clarifying details that need to be brought in, like does this include people who primarily play mobile games as gamers, or the games the poll takers play in general. We are talking about a poll after all, people could hear the word strategy and just immediately think of dense strategy games they don't like instead of the strategy inherent within your average video game. Has the base of responders shifted over 9 years? I think it's scary to think that devs are going to be applying this data honestly. The same way that I really don't buy that human attention span just nosedived in a few years (from an evolutionary perspective this seems hilariously incorrect) but instead we now have instant and almost entirely uninhibited access to something that hijacks our brains for the purpose of getting attention. this is significant because people tend to treat those statistics (as this article even calls out) like humanity is devolving, but in reality if you put the average person in the same situation they used to be in, you would get a mostly similar result. The issue there is that people are no longer putting themselves in a good situation to be productive or live good lives, and are instead spending hours in the internet content drain. I imagine the same can be said here - games are becoming better at manipulating us. If you gave people a library consisting of games from 2009-2015, compared to 2016-2024, how would they respond to this questionnare over the respective era of games?
This is by no means an exhaustive research, as it also relies in self-reports. And while it's not the best, a clear trend can be seen. I too wish to have more information, but I'll take any crumb I can get. The author explains the methodology further in their comment section, so I added a link in the description if you want to take a look at that.
i truly believe, that gamers didn't get dumber, it's just that the medium opened to normies and mobile "players" therefore all stats are impossible to read, the average population has less than 90 IQ. Most studies before that, found that games are actually beneficial for the mind, helps keeping tracks of multiple focus points at any given time, helps with maths, strategy, planning, 3D space localisation and manipulation, time management etc etc.
When I first read the article, I was under the impression it was showing a decline in the same group of gamers; but upon a quick re-read, I might've been quite wrong. The boom in popularity in the last decade or so is the most likely cause of this change indeed.
@@TheAwkwardGuy the average IQ lowered over the past decades, the bell curve is now closer to 95 than 100 with even worse distributions at the extremes, basicly smart people are really really smart and dumb people got lower still, it's basicly hard to even consider them the same species at this point, some animals exhibit extremes in their population distribution with higher IQ points than some in our human population, let that sink in... IQ average has never been 100 by definition, IQ tests do evolve in time, you can absolutely compare performances between 2 subsets at different periods, repartition is also key 68% used to be in 1delta of 15 points of the average so between 85 to 115, it's no longer the case.
i read multiple datasets of past 15 years published by Mensa if you want the precise source, is it enough data sets ? No, no study would be precise enough, are those data sets focused on first world and europe, basicly where i live, yes they are, so am i doing an extrapolation of those datasets for a generalisation of the "western" population, yes i am, so it might be unprecise, but i wouldn't say untrue.
Games are a medium. A medium which has more and more consumers as time goes. I think such generalization is unfair, as you could absolutely make the same point of people consuming any toher medium, be it book or movies. But just as a movie is not equal to a movie, a game is not equal to a game. It would make more sense to compare such metrics across different genres, because, as someone else pointed out, the differences may be caused by gaming becoming more and more casual and less nieche. I believe we've seen something similar with movies, where previous generation called it doom of younger one, but, surprise surprise, documentaries and eg. horrors will have vastly different audiences, which makes such comparisons as a whole medium dubious and blurry at best, and manipulative at the worst.
Yeah, this "research" is pretty broad, and there are many things we don't know. However, I still find interesting that apparently only the "Strategic" metric has been affected with time, even if it doesn't have to do necessarily with intelligence. Some comments have showed very plausible explanations too, I really appreciate that. Once again, I can only hope we get more researches like this (more in-depth, of course), as I find it quite a fascinating topic.
Gamers and Children are not more stupid. If anything that are more smart but less likely to engage with your way of thinking. Now what I am interested in is the affects of younger child gamers and ADHD where I don't think they are less intelligent I do think they have or we have been creating people to have lower attention spans for better or for worst.
I don't like games unless they immerse me in art, crafting, survival, simulations, grand strategy or something similar. Competitive, brainless gaming doesn't do it for me.
I don't think it's gamers that had gotten dumber, it's because there's way easier access to games and more cheap made simple games that don't require any entry skill, it's simply that more dumber people that got their hands on cheap games, not gamers becoming dumb
1st thing - WTF 11 YO is watching porn? even with old internet I don't think you notice those things until you are 12-14 and starting to go through puberty(unless those are no longer the ages kids go through puberty nowadays) before that point you don't even have the hormones to get horny to begin with and it all will seem gross. 2nd thing - they include increasingly more casual people as gamers with a wider and more casual audience as they years go by, with more casual players that are not "real gamers" you have less and less strategic and tactical gameplay. those include the "mobile gamers" like Genshin Impact(which was the best mobile games had to offer at the time, and at least have actual gameplay and story) or worse Candy Crash(basically casino bait). they mark them as gamers due to playtime which in the case of casino bait games is just gambling addicts and not gamers, which lack any sort of critical thinking skills anyways. 3rd thing - AAA studios and game producers force DEI and BRIDGE initiatives onto games which reduces the game's quality resulting in less actual games being released, this impacts the perception of "games" in the general audience of normies that qualify as gamers as they don't know the days of good strategic games like Supreme Commander and Homeworld with their scenario being an absolutely amazing tutorial AND story experience teaching you how to play the game using the game's narrative with only the win condition at the top and a side-objective from time to time that will give you a tip about how to approach the target, or be a challenge to unlock a certain unit/skill before you should be able to to help you in clearing the main objective. game DEVS are the ones not making those games, and when they do(like in the case of Palworld and Helldivers) players flock to those games like moth to flame. final conclusion: because complex games are no longer the norm, gamers don't have the game knowledge to get into more strategic games when they find them, with the embargo on the old guard of game devs the decades of knowledge of game optimization, style, and design are not being utilized in newer games making for lesser performance and lesser quality of gameplay.(like why the FUCK PirateSoftware is an indie, and Grummz isn't a game exec anymore?) and with lower visibility for good games due to no access to mainstream gaming media coverage(being relegated to the indie section or using stunts like the v-tuber pre-launch of palworld) those more strategic games remain a niche, mostly exclusive for the more hardcore gamers. and gaming is made that way to keep people dumb and obedient, just like movies, TV, and schools. I remember the days where schools taught us to do math, and my teacher actually had time to explain taxes, loans, and go over general economics in math class(the late 2000s). where my weekend TV show was a fucking biology class(there were 3 DIFFERENT SHOWS FOR THAT!!! all airing one after the other, and they were fun), history classes(another 2 shows) or something else educational on morality or whatnot.
About the 1st thing: from what I've heard, it's even worse than that. I will have to do some research and cover it on stream at some point, because it's actually WILD. About the 2nd thing: the author said in the comments (which I sadly skipped here) that they don't include mobile gamers, as "they don't identify as gamers". Personally, I'm not quite sure about that. Gacha game players are a different breed than those that play Candy Crush-style games imo, so their self-identifications might not be what was expected. We would need some exhaustive research with clear distinctions between gamer demographics, not just man-woman and US-foreigner. I appreciate the effort here, obviously, but we still lack some critical information. About the rest? Pretty spot on, honestly. Gaming, at least in the west, is getting worse and worse. It feels a bit like Hollywood nowadays. But it's not only video games, it's pretty much all entertainment: TTRPGs, board games, the comic industry, cartoons... It's depressing, and I don't know how to solve something like this, so I'm gonna keep complaining about it (and laughing at them when they inevitably fail) every week, and trying my best to support anything indie that's actually good.
You can't expect players to care about strategy when win/lose are determined by micro-transactions and the latest power creep. What use is "long term planning" when devs can make your account obsolete with a single patch?
A large portion business has shifted towards emphasizing gambling and long term monetization schemes like battle passes and in game purchases instead of making quality games unfortunately. Could be one reason for the mental decline
Instant gratification instead of working hard for a reward? It's actually a good point, I can see that playing a part as well.
It's all because most games aren't games anymore, they are just slot machines, and stimulation devices, They took all the parts of games out that don't contribute to corporate profits. (more true for mobile games than desktop)
I think big sweeping claims about human behavior are always a little dangerous. We can make a suprising amount of true claims which are backed up by things proving causal links - humans generally take the path of least resistance, for example. But theres' nuance in that. Maybe it's most accurate to say "Humans generally take the path of least resistance, at least when without strong reasons to do otherwise".
Something else to mention here - this article doesn't explain methodology. Maybe the study did, but there are clarifying details that need to be brought in, like does this include people who primarily play mobile games as gamers, or the games the poll takers play in general. We are talking about a poll after all, people could hear the word strategy and just immediately think of dense strategy games they don't like instead of the strategy inherent within your average video game. Has the base of responders shifted over 9 years? I think it's scary to think that devs are going to be applying this data honestly.
The same way that I really don't buy that human attention span just nosedived in a few years (from an evolutionary perspective this seems hilariously incorrect) but instead we now have instant and almost entirely uninhibited access to something that hijacks our brains for the purpose of getting attention. this is significant because people tend to treat those statistics (as this article even calls out) like humanity is devolving, but in reality if you put the average person in the same situation they used to be in, you would get a mostly similar result. The issue there is that people are no longer putting themselves in a good situation to be productive or live good lives, and are instead spending hours in the internet content drain.
I imagine the same can be said here - games are becoming better at manipulating us. If you gave people a library consisting of games from 2009-2015, compared to 2016-2024, how would they respond to this questionnare over the respective era of games?
This is by no means an exhaustive research, as it also relies in self-reports. And while it's not the best, a clear trend can be seen. I too wish to have more information, but I'll take any crumb I can get.
The author explains the methodology further in their comment section, so I added a link in the description if you want to take a look at that.
i truly believe, that gamers didn't get dumber, it's just that the medium opened to normies and mobile "players" therefore all stats are impossible to read, the average population has less than 90 IQ.
Most studies before that, found that games are actually beneficial for the mind, helps keeping tracks of multiple focus points at any given time, helps with maths, strategy, planning, 3D space localisation and manipulation, time management etc etc.
When I first read the article, I was under the impression it was showing a decline in the same group of gamers; but upon a quick re-read, I might've been quite wrong. The boom in popularity in the last decade or so is the most likely cause of this change indeed.
@@JinIbaraki Makes sense the general gamer IQ was higher when it was mostly dominated by social outcasts and nerds.
Average population, by definition, must have 100 IQ. What exactly is your source for "90 IQ"?
@@TheAwkwardGuy the average IQ lowered over the past decades, the bell curve is now closer to 95 than 100 with even worse distributions at the extremes, basicly smart people are really really smart and dumb people got lower still, it's basicly hard to even consider them the same species at this point, some animals exhibit extremes in their population distribution with higher IQ points than some in our human population, let that sink in... IQ average has never been 100 by definition, IQ tests do evolve in time, you can absolutely compare performances between 2 subsets at different periods, repartition is also key 68% used to be in 1delta of 15 points of the average so between 85 to 115, it's no longer the case.
i read multiple datasets of past 15 years published by Mensa if you want the precise source, is it enough data sets ? No, no study would be precise enough, are those data sets focused on first world and europe, basicly where i live, yes they are, so am i doing an extrapolation of those datasets for a generalisation of the "western" population, yes i am, so it might be unprecise, but i wouldn't say untrue.
Games are a medium. A medium which has more and more consumers as time goes. I think such generalization is unfair, as you could absolutely make the same point of people consuming any toher medium, be it book or movies. But just as a movie is not equal to a movie, a game is not equal to a game. It would make more sense to compare such metrics across different genres, because, as someone else pointed out, the differences may be caused by gaming becoming more and more casual and less nieche. I believe we've seen something similar with movies, where previous generation called it doom of younger one, but, surprise surprise, documentaries and eg. horrors will have vastly different audiences, which makes such comparisons as a whole medium dubious and blurry at best, and manipulative at the worst.
Yeah, this "research" is pretty broad, and there are many things we don't know. However, I still find interesting that apparently only the "Strategic" metric has been affected with time, even if it doesn't have to do necessarily with intelligence. Some comments have showed very plausible explanations too, I really appreciate that. Once again, I can only hope we get more researches like this (more in-depth, of course), as I find it quite a fascinating topic.
Gamers and Children are not more stupid. If anything that are more smart but less likely to engage with your way of thinking. Now what I am interested in is the affects of younger child gamers and ADHD where I don't think they are less intelligent I do think they have or we have been creating people to have lower attention spans for better or for worst.
that's crazy, all I play are grand strategy games
guess we are a minority?
@@reignofterror02 we’re just built different 💪🏽
I have a love/hate relationship with hoi4 and Stellaris
Its not all i play but its a great genre
I don't like games unless they immerse me in art, crafting, survival, simulations, grand strategy or something similar.
Competitive, brainless gaming doesn't do it for me.
I don't think it's gamers that had gotten dumber, it's because there's way easier access to games and more cheap made simple games that don't require any entry skill, it's simply that more dumber people that got their hands on cheap games, not gamers becoming dumb
theyve just gotten normie-er
1st thing - WTF 11 YO is watching porn? even with old internet I don't think you notice those things until you are 12-14 and starting to go through puberty(unless those are no longer the ages kids go through puberty nowadays) before that point you don't even have the hormones to get horny to begin with and it all will seem gross.
2nd thing - they include increasingly more casual people as gamers with a wider and more casual audience as they years go by, with more casual players that are not "real gamers" you have less and less strategic and tactical gameplay.
those include the "mobile gamers" like Genshin Impact(which was the best mobile games had to offer at the time, and at least have actual gameplay and story) or worse Candy Crash(basically casino bait).
they mark them as gamers due to playtime which in the case of casino bait games is just gambling addicts and not gamers, which lack any sort of critical thinking skills anyways.
3rd thing - AAA studios and game producers force DEI and BRIDGE initiatives onto games which reduces the game's quality resulting in less actual games being released, this impacts the perception of "games" in the general audience of normies that qualify as gamers as they don't know the days of good strategic games like Supreme Commander and Homeworld with their scenario being an absolutely amazing tutorial AND story experience teaching you how to play the game using the game's narrative with only the win condition at the top and a side-objective from time to time that will give you a tip about how to approach the target, or be a challenge to unlock a certain unit/skill before you should be able to to help you in clearing the main objective.
game DEVS are the ones not making those games, and when they do(like in the case of Palworld and Helldivers) players flock to those games like moth to flame.
final conclusion:
because complex games are no longer the norm, gamers don't have the game knowledge to get into more strategic games when they find them, with the embargo on the old guard of game devs the decades of knowledge of game optimization, style, and design are not being utilized in newer games making for lesser performance and lesser quality of gameplay.(like why the FUCK PirateSoftware is an indie, and Grummz isn't a game exec anymore?)
and with lower visibility for good games due to no access to mainstream gaming media coverage(being relegated to the indie section or using stunts like the v-tuber pre-launch of palworld) those more strategic games remain a niche, mostly exclusive for the more hardcore gamers.
and gaming is made that way to keep people dumb and obedient, just like movies, TV, and schools.
I remember the days where schools taught us to do math, and my teacher actually had time to explain taxes, loans, and go over general economics in math class(the late 2000s).
where my weekend TV show was a fucking biology class(there were 3 DIFFERENT SHOWS FOR THAT!!! all airing one after the other, and they were fun), history classes(another 2 shows) or something else educational on morality or whatnot.
About the 1st thing: from what I've heard, it's even worse than that. I will have to do some research and cover it on stream at some point, because it's actually WILD.
About the 2nd thing: the author said in the comments (which I sadly skipped here) that they don't include mobile gamers, as "they don't identify as gamers". Personally, I'm not quite sure about that. Gacha game players are a different breed than those that play Candy Crush-style games imo, so their self-identifications might not be what was expected. We would need some exhaustive research with clear distinctions between gamer demographics, not just man-woman and US-foreigner. I appreciate the effort here, obviously, but we still lack some critical information.
About the rest? Pretty spot on, honestly. Gaming, at least in the west, is getting worse and worse. It feels a bit like Hollywood nowadays. But it's not only video games, it's pretty much all entertainment: TTRPGs, board games, the comic industry, cartoons... It's depressing, and I don't know how to solve something like this, so I'm gonna keep complaining about it (and laughing at them when they inevitably fail) every week, and trying my best to support anything indie that's actually good.
bruh i started watching porn when i was 7-8
@@AarneHeljakka rip brain.
Great. Mom was right.
Bluntly speaking "Diversification" is largely to blame.